I'm making curtains. I *might* have gotten myself into a pickle.

I need help. Not the pill kind; I already have that covered. My visionary skills, while lacking severely on the spacial front, are usually pretty good with colors n' stuff. But most of my projects don't involve the amount of math and thinking and general importance of this project.


I'm going to have to look at these curtains every day, so my main concern at this point is not messing them up. Later my concern that my two old and decrepit sewing machines might fail me will come into play. For now I'm pretty comfortable with my measurements and basic design - covering an area just larger than the window, the main portion will be vertical grey stripe with a smaller portion of solid green, separated by black grosgrain ribbon. But here's the question: does the green go on top or on bottom?

Please, please sparse friends, what do you think?

Drawings 13, 14, 15, and 16.

I'm guessing it won't happen very often that I get to draw something that is a real, one-of-a-kind thing in my own little sphere of existence.


I have spoken many times about "the cabin." It's a magical place that I have almost no trouble drawing from memory. I'm too lazy to dig up one of our infamous check-out day family portraits out front, but rest assured this is the same cabin. The photo is from the lake side of the cabin, but if you were to walk around the corner to the right your eyes would fall upon my drawing.

-=-=-=-

I drew young shrubs.


The caption on this photo was "It's a shrubbery!" I thought "shrubbery" was plural or something, but this caption has me all confused. Are "shrubbery" and "shrubs" interchangeable? Shouldn't it just be "It's a shrub!"? Oh God, do I put the question mark inside the quotes as usual or does that just change the caption from an excited statement to an expletive query? GRAMMAR YOU ARE A WORTHY FOE!*

-=-=-=-

I especially like the mushroom on the right because it really depicts those tiny underside gills that make you feel like you're eating centipede legs.


Apparently this photo is of one variety of "magic" mushrooms."** I disagree. They probably still have centipede legs and there's nothing magical about that so now we're faced with a philosophical question: Do magic mushrooms exist?

-=-=-=-

Thank God this book doesn't give any instructions. That convenient fact has prevented me from literally desecrating a rather attractive and talented man.


Ok, the scrappy beard isn't the best thing that ever happened.




* Nerd.
** Pretty sure there has never been so many quotes in one blog post.

I wish I made this.

There's a "Peeps Show" diorama contest every year and I wish I would remember to enter. Who doesn't love making dioramas? Ok, the Auschwitz one Megan and I made in junior high wasn't so much *fun* as it was *devastating.*


But then there's this. It's my favorite of the finalists. ANIMAL!!! Now taking suggestions for next year's entry.

Drawings 10, 11, and 12.

Bam! Corkscrew. It's one of the teaser drawings on the cover of the book, so I had a teensy bit of help. I just couldn't figure out how the arms attach to the body.

Aaaaand then there's the fire escape. In the first 11 pages of Google Images, there is not one fire pole and now that I really think of it I guess they are not at all the same thing. But for whatever reason - maybe the intensity of my *awesome* corkscrew - my heart began to palpitate as I thought of drawing dozens and dozens of stairs against a charming building covered in hundreds and hundreds of bricks and I desperately latched onto the idea that a person could simply slide down a pole in a fire situation and that would be that.

Moving on...
Question A. What is a plankton?
Question B. How the hell do you draw luminescence?


Answer A. Guess.
Answer B. You don't. You draw superhero jazz around it and use editing software to apply a color to the whole page.


I could be wrong about this (if so, it has *nothing* to do with shoddy research and I curse Google Images for not being a reliable source!) but there seems to be a variety of plankton. So I chose a picture of one kind of close to mine. Ok, mine looks a little....um, like a sperm. But it's also more cuddly-looking. Like you wouldn't immediately shriek and pee yourself if you found one on your leg one day at the beach. I'm actually fairly certain that my luminescent, cuddly, superhero sperm-plankton is what Sugarhill Gang wrote Rapper's Delight about.